One of the vital aspects of the Task Force will be to better coordinate criminal and civil enforcement efforts.

As the Director of Enforcement of the SEC, and a former federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice, I have seen first-hand the benefits of coordinated civil and criminal enforcement efforts.

And coordination is a virtue that we at the SEC have learned well.

In fact, in FY 2009, more than 150 of the SEC's enforcement cases were filed in coordination with criminal charges filed by the DOJ and others, an increase of 30 percent over FY 2008.

The Task Force should only increase those numbers, and provide even greater opportunities for close collaboration and information sharing among law enforcement authorities.

The creation of the Task Force occurs at a time that we at the SEC have taken a series of steps to optimize our effectiveness. These will make us an even more effective partner to other Task Force members.

For example, we are launching national specialized units, three of which will focus on such things as derivatives and securitized products; broad-based insider trading and market manipulations; and fraud among hedge funds and investment advisers.

We are also streamlining management and redeploying additional staff to the front-line task of conducting investigations and rationalizing our procedures to make us more nimble and better informed.

These internal changes at the SEC, combined with the opportunities for collaboration as a member of the Task Force, will further enhance our vigorous and focused enforcement efforts.

We come to the Task Force with a long history of successful financial fraud enforcement, and our recent efforts continue this record of accomplishment.

More than half of our cases in recent years have targeted financial fraud, market manipulation, and wrongdoing by investment advisers, investment companies and broker-dealers.

Concealment by a mortgage lender and its executives of its deteriorating business model and increasingly risky mortgage lending practices;

Inflated valuation of commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities by a mutual fund, and selective disclosure to favored investors that writedowns in that fund were imminent, thus allowing them to sell ahead of others and avoid losses; and